Look back in sadness: Mark Steyn reflects on his Toronto adventure

One of the interesting aspects of my day at Queen’s Park was how little ammunition the big guns of the Liberal and New Democratic parties could actually muster. They fired two blanks that barely sputtered. The nice lady Dipper dredged up the “No Irish May Apply” signs – rarer than unicorns even in their alleged heyday – and the Grit guy was even lazier and relied on Oliver Wendell Holmes’ clapped out “shouting fire in a theatre” drivel.

Why a progressive Canadian Liberal can find no better argument than that of a eugenicist kook swatting down the anti-war protesters of his day is a mystery to me.

But the point is: That’s all the argument they need. The default assumption of my all-white liberal-left interrogators was that, if it weren’t for Ontario’s “human rights” regime, the citizenry would revert to their ugliest knuckledragging inclinations. At one level, this is perplexing. If the natural condition of an Ontarian is to be a racist sexist hatemonger, how have all these nice progressive members of parliament somehow managed to rise above such genetic predispositions? Why are they so uniquely equipped to keep the rest of the citizenry in check?

Well, of course, they’re not. But a contempt for the citizenry at large is necessary to justify their and Commissar Hall’s sinecures.